Day care operator convicted of Satanic child abuse released

By Crimesider Staff

November 29, 2013 / 2:12 PM
/ CBS/Reuters

AUSTIN, Texas - Texas has released a woman who spent 21 years in jail
on charges of sexually abusing children in satanic rituals at her day care
facility, declaring that expert medical testimony that helped convict her was wrong.

Frances Keller, 63, was released on bond late Tuesday night and her husband,
Dan Keller, who was convicted at the same time, will be released within a week
in a deal reached with lawyers for both, the Travis County district
attorney's office said.

"There is a reasonable likelihood that (the medical expert's) false
testimony affected the judgment of the jury and violated Frances Keller's right
to a fair trial," Rosemary Lehmberg, the district attorney for Travis
County, which is located in central Texas and includes the city of Austin, said
in a statement.

The release comes on the heels of a similar move in San Antonio where
prosecutors agreed this month to release three lesbian women imprisoned since
1998 on sexual assault convictions that critics say were based on junk science
and false views on sexual orientation.

Michael Mouw, the doctor whose testimony helped convict the Kellers, said in
an affidavit this year that he had little training at the
time on how to examine sexual abuse in children and came to the wrong
conclusions in examining a child in the Keller case.

"While my testimony was based on a good faith belief at that time, I
now realize my conclusion is not scientifically or medically valid, and that I
was mistaken," he said in the affidavit, which was obtained by Reuters.

The Kellers were convicted Nov. 30, 1992, and sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually
abusing a 3-year-old girl in their care, reports the Austin Chronicle. The
couple faced accusations of dismembering corpses, putting blood in drinks
served to children and flying children to Mexico, where they would be sexually
abused.

"The Keller case is definitely about the panic back then," Keith
Hampton, a lawyer for Frances Keller, told Reuters.

Hampton filed a 128-page writ earlier this year in which he sought to refute
the accusations leveled against the Kellers as well as describe the panic about
day care in that era.

The convictions in Texas were part of a national trend in the 1980s and
early 1990s triggered by sensational accusations of satanic rituals and the
sexual abuse of hundreds of children at a California preschool in what was
known as the McMartin case.

Daytime talk show hosts stoked the fire with segments describing horrors
inflicted upon children at day care.

Between 1984 to 1989, some 100 people nationwide were charged with ritual
sex abuse and 50 were put on trial, according to Debbie Nathan of the National
Center for Reason and Justice, which works to free those wrongly imprisoned.

Many have since questioned a number of the cases, which they said were based
on faulty testimony coaxed out of children from purported experts on recovered
memories and backed by dubious medical testimony on signs of sexual abuse.

Most of the charges were dismissed in the McMartin case. Hampton sees more
people falsely convicted being set free.

"You are soon going to see a flood of exonerations on these sexual
abuse cases," he said.